Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [59]
Taft could not refrain from chortling. “Have you seen the newspapers this afternoon?” he asked Archie Butt. “They have defeated Theodore.”
Butt was so angry he had to go outside and stare at the sea to calm down. “It makes me ill,” he wrote his sister-in-law that night, “to see the President lessen his own character by lending himself and his great office to these petty devices to humiliate his predecessor.”
A news flash from Oyster Bay next day reported that the Colonel had told friends that he might have to oppose Taft in 1912 to preserve his progressive legacy. He neither confirmed nor denied that rumor, contenting himself with an announcement that he would go to Saratoga as a delegate from Nassau County, and would run against Sherman for the chairmanship. Barnes warned that there would be dead bodies in his way. “So they want a fight, do they?” Roosevelt responded. “By George, they shall have it.” With that, he left New York on his western tour.
“BARNES WARNED THAT THERE WOULD BE DEAD BODIES IN HIS WAY.”
William Barnes, Jr. (photo credit i5.1)
ROOSEVELT WAS GLOOMY about embarking on a “Teddysee,” closely watched by the press, which might well leave the Party more fragmented than it was already. He had lost his former zest for whistle-stop speeches and—though he would not admit it—much of his love for crowds. He worried that his throat, sandpapered by dusty drought conditions on Long Island, would not stand the strain of nearly three weeks of shouting at people. “Ugh! I do dread … having to plunge into this cauldron of politics.”
The truth was, he was not well. Earlier in the month, he had visited the anthracite country of Pennsylvania, and been struck by a recurrence of the same ailment that had immobilized him during the Coal Strike of 1902: an inflammation of the left shinbone, complicated by an attack of Cuban fever. He was also regaining the weight he had lost in Africa. He vowed that after this tour, and a lecture trip he was committed to the following spring, he would never again go on the road for any length of time.
Without much hope that anyone would believe him, Roosevelt insisted that he was traveling as an independent commentator, in behalf of The Outlook. This did not deter representatives of other magazines and newspapers from attaching a special car to his train. “It is incredible that there should remain a single American citizen,” declared the New York Sun, “who does not see that Theodore Roosevelt has undertaken a campaign for the presidential nomination in 1912.”
Rolling north on 23 August through Albany (stronghold of William Barnes, Jr.) and Utica (hometown of Vice President Sherman), he tried at first not to talk about politics at all. His provincial audiences reacted with dismay, and he realized that they wanted him to behave like a candidate for the presidency.
“I don’t care that for it,” he said, snapping his fingers, to O. K. Davis of The New York Times. “I’ve had all the work and all the fun and all the glory of it.”
Davis waited for the inevitable follow-on. “Of course, if there were a big job to be done which the people wanted me to handle, that would be a different thing.”
Proceeding via Buffalo into Ohio, Roosevelt began to address current issues—conservation, corporation control, labor and welfare reform—but carefully pitched his rhetoric so as not to offend conservative opinion. He praised the administration in the blandest possible language, refraining from any direct endorsement of Taft. As Ohio gave way to Indiana and the plains states, where insurgent candidates were registering dramatic gains in primary elections and conventions, he began to sound more progressive. But he said little that the President might not have said, to please the same audiences. He wanted to give maximum impact to what he called his “credo” at Osawatomie.
FOR A FEW RECREATIONAL HOURS, in Wyoming